“You must be used to men fighting over you.” I mean it as a compliment, an appeal to her vanity, but Sonny regards me blankly. Splotches of pink line her eyes, from lack of sleep or freshly peeled skin. It’s as if the varnish of ease has been scraped off her, like paper from a billboard.
“I’m used to everything,” she says in a low, beaten voice. “But if you think I enjoy those kinds of incidents, you’re out of your mind. I have enough to worry about without a demonstration of two adult men behaving like jealous children.”
“What was Charlie saying about Miles owing money back in London?”
She lifts her hands up to catch an enormous, invisible ball.
“I don’t know,” she mutters. “And I didn’t ask. How is it my business? Don’t we all come to this kind of place so we don’t have to think about the problems we left behind? If Miles got into trouble at home, I’m sure he’ll deal with it when he goes back. I mean, did you come to Patmos to be quizzed about every problem you had in New York?”
Nothing in her frank expression reveals an awareness of my situation, but the allusion is too well placed. She must know, at least, about Panama. And Charlie had to have told her how desperate I am for money, because she hasn’t once asked why I’d be taking a job at his charter company. Sonny could be one of the last humans who doesn’t find entertainment in the flailing lives that haunt her periphery. She seems compassionately uninterested in sore spots. But if I had any expectation of forging a bond with her, she shoots that prospect down with her next question.
“So why are you here?”
I’m still Charlie’s friend, a perhaps not entirely welcome intruder. Charlie warned me that I’d be taken as competition. Worse, I’m an intruder without a return ticket. I’ll be following them back to Cyprus in the fall like an injured dog discovered on a beach that’s too pitiful and weak to be abandoned.
“I visited Charlie this morning,” I broadcast loudly, to emphasize the purpose of my visit.
“What?” Sonny blinks and shifts forward in her seat. For the first time she seems genuinely interested in me, as if I have something that belongs to her. “You did? You visited him? Where is he?”
Probably lounging on the docks of Bodrum right now or eating sushi with his boat captains at the coastal outpost of an expensive Japanese restaurant. Chugging sake. Visually undressing Turkish girls.
“He spent the night on Domitian.”
“He did?” Her head reels back. “I should have figured. The floating bachelor pad.” Her hand grips the armrest. “You were on Domitian?”
“Yeah. Before I came here. He’s still pretty upset. His eye isn’t looking too good. Neither one is. He’s like a raccoon. Who the hell punched him the night before?”
But Sonny isn’t concerned with answering questions, only posing them. She stares at me intently.
“Where is Domitian? Where did you board?”
I can’t remember if Charlie gave me an exact location of the yacht. Sonny knows his habitual mooring spots better than I do. I’m struggling for a safe reply, latching onto the first scenario that flares through my brain.
“He picked me up at the beach near Kampos. I swam out.”
“That’s weird. I saw Christos this morning and asked him if he saw Charlie. He said he hadn’t. He said he’d spent the morning washing Domitian.”
One foot in the quicksand of a lie is still too deep to escape. Damn it, Charlie. You told me Christos was in on your cover.
“He probably told Christos not to give him up,” I say nonchalantly. “He’s still a little hungover and hurt. Like you said, it will probably take him a day or two to come to his senses.”
“A day or two?” Sonny screeches. “He’s really that upset? You saw him, you swam out and saw him, and he said he’s not coming home for a day or two?” Support. Development. Upkeep. I’m earning my salary on Sonny’s ruthless fact check. I assume she’s about to play another card that exposes my dishonesty—were you wearing a swimsuit and, if so, what did you do with your cell phone and wallet? What does Domitian look like in the morning? Were the sails up or down?—but she slumps back in the chair. “So like him. He wants me to call and beg him to come home. He wants me to wave the white flag so he doesn’t have to feel guilty.” She taps her nail on the armrest. “Well, that’s not going to happen.”
“He said he was sorry. Very sorry. He realizes he acted like an asshole.”
“Oh, he wasn’t acting. If I didn’t have Duck here, I might consider taking a break from the island for a few days too. But he knows I’m stuck. Maybe I should text him and say I’m leaving. That will get him here within an hour.”
A threatening text from Sonny will only signal that I’ve failed, that I’ve made the circumstances worse instead of better. Day one of employment: torpedo Charlie’s relationship. Still, Sonny doesn’t reach for her phone, as if uncertain of the result. She must have learned that testing love often confirms its limits.
“He does love you,” I say. I try to recall the weakness in Charlie’s voice when he confessed that much to me in his office. “He’s trying to be a better person and would be lost without you. He just needs time to cool off. But you’re all he has and why he works so hard.”
She gazes at me with amusement, one romantic pronouncement away from laughing in my face. I look away embarrassed, as if the confession were mine.
“Don’t feel bad,” Sonny says, rising from the chair and gathering the bowl from the coffee table. “It was a nice try. I’d love to meet whoever you’re talking about.”
“Those might not have been his exact words.”
“Get back to me when you have them.” The bowl sloshes as she carries it toward the kitchen. “Whatever he told you on the boat today, I’m sure it was a whole lot nastier. Otherwise, he’d be home right now.”
“He also said you’ve been worried about him. Worried about being here on Patmos because of the bomb that went off.”
Sonny picks up her pace and disappears through the doorway. After dumping the water in the sink, she calls from the kitchen. “Are you thirsty?”
“No. I’m good.”
She returns with an emerald-green bottle of water and scans the bookshelf, gliding her finger across the leather bindings, the languid yellows and browns of autumn leaves before they break into rotting red. I see the green Bible where Charlie stowed his family snapshot. If I die, shake my books. I’m relieved, after the bike accident, that I won’t need to. Sonny pulls out a large dusty volume, bouncing it off her leg and lugging it to the coffee table.
“I’ve been meaning to show Duck this atlas. The colors of the oceans and deserts are so gorgeous. When I first moved here I spent days flipping through it.” She opens the book to a map of Saudi Arabia, washed in pellucid watercolors and calligraphied with the names of ancient towns. “They’re almost like abstract paintings. Each country is done with such care. Charlie would have me close my eyes while he turned the pages and I’d randomly drop my finger down, and if the colors were beautiful enough we’d agree to go there in the winter. That’s how we ended up in Lebanon last Thanksgiving.” She smiles up at me, her blue eyes exerting a soft pressure. “Of course, it didn’t take me long to catch onto the fact that Charlie was only pretending to turn the pages. There I was dropping my finger on the exact spot where he had already planned for us to go. I didn’t call him out on his cheating. I felt it mattered to him somehow that I believed we were leaving it up to chance.” I wonder if she ever called Charlie out on his cheating before he converted into a faithful man. Maybe, even then, she avoided sore spots.
Sonny flips a few pages, searching for a better country. “I’m going to show Duck Cyprus. The artist painted it red, so it looks like a deep-sea fish trying to swallow Western Asia. I want her to see it that way, so when she goes with us it’s a sweet little creature swimming in her mind. Not the barbed wire and oil drums that split Nicosia in half.”
“Even if it isn’t by chance, at least you’re seeing the
world.”
“Oh, I’m seeing it,” she agrees. “Up close.” A coldness creeps over her, its temperature measurable by the shrinking of her smile. “You asked about the bomb. I was in Paris that day. And when I heard the news, I was sure Charlie was dead. I had just left Louise at the Palais-Royal, actually. It took an hour to get him on the phone. And for every minute of that hour I was hysterical, like the world was skipping on its needle, and only when I finally got ahold of him and heard his voice did the music come back. I booked myself on the first plane, and when I got here, it was all the same, except that the taverna was blown apart and the army had descended. The Greek and German armies. Maybe some American forces. I paid a taxi double to hurry up the hill to Chora. And here Charlie was, lying across the couch you’re sitting on, asking me what I was doing home from Paris so soon. Like the whole matter had been as minor as a headache.”
Sonny takes a sip of water. In the silence of the room, I hear the thin moaning of a lamb in a field below Chora. It sounds like an animal lost, crying out at regular intervals for the rest of her flock.
“The bomb didn’t worry me. It scared me half to death. It blew up at the exact time and place Charlie had his coffee every morning. What’s the acceptable reaction for something like that? Charlie thinks I’m crazy, and some days I suppose I am. He says it’s just a coincidence, the world being uglier than the people who live in it, that we’re all soft targets wherever we go.” Sonny leans forward and taps the atlas. “But, you see, he’s been trying to convince me of the random nature of plans for a while now.” She slumps on the carpet, her knees folded at impressive acute angles from her daily yoga sessions. Yoga, and palm reading, and Pilates, and a facialist—all the expensive hands that touch this body in front of me. “Maybe he’s right. Nothing’s happened. The world keeps spinning. The music plays.”
“Why would someone try to kill Charlie?”
She gives me a look of absolute bewilderment. “I have no idea. None. But he’s been stressed and nervous all summer, ever since we came here in April. He gets up in the middle of the night and paces on the balcony, smoking his lungs black. He says it’s business or his father’s health. But you know Charlie. You know him as well as I do. Or you did. The more you pummel him with questions, the more he shrinks from you. It’s not that I don’t ask, Ian. It’s that I can’t. And that’s why I won’t text him now. Bothering him when he isn’t ready is the best way to keep him away.”
Up until now, I haven’t thought of Sonny as lonely. Lucky. Well matched. Smart. But loneliness is harder to detect when it’s camouflaged in excess. I can understand how, surrounded by all the comforts of a house that doesn’t belong to her and stuck with a boyfriend who sets the conditions of their confidences, Sonny might resort to psychics for a shred of predictability. What can psychics do but encourage you through a field of land mines you have to cross anyway. Yet it’s precisely because Charlie hides so much from her that she imagines him someone who could be wanted dead.
“Thank god nothing else has happened,” I say.
“Yeah. It proves I’m crazy. I can handle being crazy. Better crazy than Charlie gone.”
I’m relieved that I didn’t tell her about the dead hippies. The news might bring her running to Domitian, only to find it empty and washed.
“He didn’t say anything to you, did he?” Sonny searches my face, as if scanning for a bird in thick birches. “About some reason he’s been so on edge? I know he’s your friend, and best friends stick together. But I hope you’d tell me. Since you’ll be living with us, with Charlie, Duck, and me all year round now, I was hoping we could be friends too.”
I shake my head and deliver the one word she’s sick of hearing. “Sorry. I probably know less than you do. I haven’t even started working for him yet.”
She swallows hard, as if taking down a dry vitamin.
“Oh well. I thought I’d ask. If you do talk to Charlie again before I do, tell him his father’s surgery was pushed up to tomorrow. Apparently his health took a turn in the night, and they decided it’s best to operate immediately. I got a call on the house phone from his doctor about an hour ago.”
“Is it serious?”
“It’s always serious,” she says lightly as she gets to her feet. “But he has surgery about once a month. We stopped lighting candles after the seventh scare. Even though Charlie’s a devoted nonbeliever, he used to ask the monks to perform a special prayer, back when it felt like it might go badly. But Mr. K can afford the best doctors, and I guess if you have the money, they find a way to keep you alive. I swear, there must be claw marks in Manhattan as deep as the Grand Canyon from how desperately he’s trying to hold on to the world.” I think of how easily my father went in his bed, without much sound or struggle, his hands spread on the bed like two white, airless flags. Sonny pinches the tip of her tongue, pulling a piece of fuzz from it. “If it isn’t his father’s heart, it’s his lungs or his kidneys. This time it’s his heart. I’m not allowed to send the flowers. That’s one responsibility I’m free of.”
“Why is that?”
She tilts her head to the side and eyes me belligerently.
“You know why. Don’t act surprised. You grew up the same as he did.”
“Not exactly.”
“Exact enough. They’ll accept a total degenerate as a friend of the family, sure, open arms, mi casa, su casa. But they’re not so hospitable when it comes to a girlfriend. His family hates me. I think the polite wording is, doesn’t approve. They see me as a flyover person, a pretty but low-rent stop on the route to somewhere better. You’ve seen the way Rasym treats me, like I’ve managed to worm into their lives on false papers. And Rasym’s people in Nicosia, Charlie’s relatives, are even worse. Maybe it’s a class thing. Or a money thing. Or that I started out in Hollywood and they’ve Googled all the wrong photos of me because I had the audacity to pay my own bills when I was young. Or maybe they just don’t like me. Who the fuck knows? But it’s like the Konstantinous live at some high altitude, and the air is so thin you can’t even breathe.”
“I doubt it matters to Charlie.”
“No.” She grins. “It doesn’t.” She wanders over to a marble end table and clicks through her phone. “There’s a song, a really old, rare Chet Baker. I introduced Charlie to it. It’s our song. Once I heard him playing it for someone else. He said, check out this song I found, and I thought, you shit, I gave you that. But that’s love, right? You let go of who brought what to it. It’s ours, so it’s his. And if the Konstantinous took away everything else, the house and boats and all the trips and even this island, we’d still have that song. You can’t strip everything away.”
I’m familiar with that feeling of jealous proprietorship over one’s own tastes. Even in my early twenties I became a one-man paramilitary every time an esoteric band I loved gained a mass following. But that resentment exposes its own internal weakness: there is so little that sets you apart, you can’t afford to lose a single distinction.
Sonny’s about to press PLAY on her rare Chet Baker when four knocks boom from the door.
“Charlie!” I yell. But Sonny doesn’t share my hope. She stumbles sluggishly across the rug, her feet leaving scarlet wave crests in her wake.
She opens the door to a diminutive Malaysian woman with gray pigtails and a navy canvas robe. The woman steps inside wielding a flat metal suitcase.
“Good afternoon,” she announces with phonetic buoyancy, each vowel a rickety chain on a wooden roller coaster. She dips her head at me as Sonny points toward the ironing board.
“Right there is fine, Andrea.”
Andrea makes a peace sign with her hand and I’m about to return the universe-affirming gesture, when she asks, “Is it for two today?”
“No. Ian’s just leaving.”
Andrea begins transforming her suitcase into a foldout massage table.
“Do you mind if I use your bathroom?” I ask. Sonny nods as she shakes her hair free from the band. As I pass
by she latches onto my arm.
“Thank you for coming. For bringing news of him. I bet you Charlie is home by dusk. He gets bored of his stances after a few hours.”
I descend the dark staircase for one last task as Charlie’s emissary. It’s a chance to counterbalance the deceitful message with a deceitful act that might convince Sonny she still takes up the whole of his heart. Learn the game, and anyone can play it. I pull the black, hand-carved queen from my pocket, the one I accidentally pinched from Charlie’s board. On the staircase, the lamb’s moaning becomes louder and more insistent. I pass Stefan’s empty room with the blanket smoothed across the cot. As I pass the second half-open door, I catch sight of Adrian and Rasym, both naked, hunched together in a Heimlich lock over the corner of their bed. Rasym is on top, his thin, velvet-haired ass dimpling with each thrust, his cheeks yellow with sweat, his small brassy hands flat on ivory shoulders. Adrian is below him, his muscular arms splayed across the mattress, his mouth and eyes open, making small plaintive cries. For a second, I don’t even realize that I’ve stopped in the hallway mesmerized, struck not only by the fact that it’s Rasym who fucks Adrian and not the reverse, but by the vision of Adrian’s angelic face, creased in pain and yet transported, held in that impossible harmony of hurt and ecstasy, with every muscle operating to unfasten the brain and dissolve the world. His whole face is fluttering, drowsy, a wire carrying too much current. He’s like an ancient Roman statue being smashed, finally, decisively, by a baseball bat.
I move into the master bedroom, hunting for Sonny’s purse. Her straw beach satchel sits on the dresser, loaded with a bikini top and three different bottles of French sunscreen. I drop the queen below the bottles, hoping she’ll find it, one more volley in their ongoing smuggling competition of who can trick whom and almost get away with it. Sonny didn’t trust my generic avowals of love because that’s not the way she and Charlie communicate. They speak the language of gentle deceptions.
The Destroyers Page 24
